Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Second Edition of Duc: Triumph of the Absurd

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The American edition

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The German edition

A memoir by Uwe
Siemon-Netto

Forty
years ago, absurdity triumphed in South Vietnam. On April 30, 1975, the wrong
side conquered this tortured country. The Communists did not achieve their
victory by occupying the moral high ground, as their adulators in the Western
world would have us believe. In the light the present debate about the
apparently squandered U.S. victory in Iraq and the impending withdrawal of NATO
forces from Afghanistan it is worth remembering that Hanoi crushed South
Vietnam with torture, mass murder and other horrendous acts of terror committed
with cold strategic intent.

I
covered the Vietnam War as a staff correspondent for Axel Springer Verlag, West Germany’s largest publishing house. In
this second edition of my memoir, I address the question how the Communists managed
to gain the upper hand after their clear military defeat he had witnessed as a
combat correspondent during the Têt Offensive in Huế in 1968? I suggest that the answer can be found
in the sinister prediction by Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese defense
minister: “The enemy (meaning, the West)… does not possess the psychological
and political means to fight a long-drawn-out war.” In his commentary on the
fall of Saigon, Adelbert Weinstein, the brilliant military specialist of
Germany’s renowned Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, summed up the reason for the victory of this totalitarian power in
one short, elegiac sentence: “America could not wait.” My comment: “Even more dangerous totalitarians [than the Vietnamese Communists] are taking note today.”

I
had titled the first edition of my book Đức,
which is the Vietnamese word for German and was my nickname during my time as a
Vietnam War correspondent. In the words of Peter R. Kann, the former publisher
of the Wall Street Journal, “Uwe
Siemon-Netto, the distinguished German journalist, has written a masterful
memoir… He captures, as very few others have, the pathos and absurdities,
the combat, cruelties and human cost of a conflict, which -- as
he unflinchingly and correctly argues -- the wrong side won. “From the street cafes of Saigon to special
forces outposts in the central highlands, from villages where terror
comes at night to the carnage and war crimes visited on the city of
Hue at Tet, 1968, Uwe brings a brilliant reportorial talent and touch.
Above all, Uwe writes about the Vietnamese people: street urchins and
buffalo boys, courageous warriors and hapless war victims, and the full
human panoply of a society at war. "As a German, Uwe had, as he puts
it, ‘no dog in this fight’, but he understood the rights and wrongs of this war
better than almost anyone and his heart, throughout the powerful and moving
volume, is always and ardently with the Vietnamese people.Bestseller author Barbara Taylor Bradford called this work “one of the most touching and moving books I have read in a
long time. It is also hilarious… I did cry at times, but I also laughed.”
Former UPI editor-in-chief John O’Sullivan, described itas an “angry account of a betrayal of a nation,” adding, “But
there is hope about people on every page too.” Partly as a result of his Vietnam experiences, I turned to theology,
earning an MA and a Ph.D. in this field and writing a textbook on pastoral care
to former warriors, titled, “The
Acquittal of God, A Theology for Vietnam Veterans.” Written in English, Triumph of the Absurd will is now
available on Amazon.com. A Vietnamese-language version can be bought on
Siemon-Netto’s website, www.siemon-netto.org,
and a German edition will be ready by the end of February. I am moved by the high acclaim my memoir has won so far: “This
brilliant book reminds me of Theodore White’s In Search of History,” commented Maj. Gen. H.R. McMaster, author
of Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson,
Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs and the Lies that Led to Vietnam. “Uwe
Siemon-Netto challenges facets of our flawed historical memory of the Vietnam
War.”

Following: my new preface

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Preface

Đức or the triumph of the absurd

Forty years ago, absurdity triumphed in South Vietnam. On April
30, 1975, the wrong side conquered this tortured country. The Communists did
not achieve their victory because they owned the moral high ground, as their
adulators in the Western world would have us believe. They crushed South
Vietnam with torture, mass murder and other horrendous acts of terror committed
with cold strategic intent in violation of international law. I lived in Paris
when their tanks crashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace in
Saigon. As I watched this on television, I wondered: How did they manage to
gain the upper hand after their clear military defeat I had witnessed as a
combat correspondent during the Têt Offensive in Huế in 1968?

The answer can be found in the sinister prediction by Gen. Vo
Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese defense minister: “The enemy (meaning, the
West)… does not possess the psychological and political means to fight a
long-drawn-out war.” In his commentary on the fall of Saigon, Adelbert
Weinstein, the brilliant military specialist of Germany’s renowned Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung summed up
the reason for the victory of this totalitarian power in one short, elegiac
sentence: “America could not wait.”

Giap’s prophetic words and the adjective, absurd, will reappear
time and again in several chapters of this book. They are meant to be a
recurrent theme intended to remind my readers why I wrote this memoir of my
five years in Vietnam four decades later.

I would like this
leitmotif to shine through the potpourri of mirthful or sad, erotic as well as
lethal episodes in my narrative. Equally important is a second theme underlying
these reminiscences: my declaration of love for the wounded, betrayed and
abandoned people of South Vietnam whom too the authors of many other books
about this war have arrogantly and absurdly assigned a subordinate place.

This is why I have renamed the second edition of this memoir Triumph of the Absurd, replacing the
initial title, Đức. But I would like to make it clear that this original title is
still very much on my mind, for three reasons: 1. Đức is the Vietnamese term for
German, and these are after all the reminiscences of a German war
correspondent.2. Đức was the nickname my Vietnamese friends gave me when I lived among
them. 3. Đức was the name of two of my
protagonists, one a buffalo boy in central Vietnam, and the other a feisty and
amusing urchin I befriended in Saigon.

That latter Đức, whom I will now
introduce in this preface, was the spindly leader of a gang of homeless kids
roaming the sidewalks of “my” block of Tu Do Street. We met in 1965 when Tu Do,
the former Rue Catinat, still displayed traces of its former French colonial
charm; it was still shaded by bushy and bright green tamarind trees, which
would later fall victim to the exhaust fumes of tens of thousands of mopeds
with two-stroke engines and prehistoric cars such my grey 1938 Citroen 15 CV Traction Avant, the “gangster car”
of French film classics. This car was nearly my age, a metric ton of elegance
on wheels -- and very thirsty; eight miles were all she gave me for a gallon of
gasoline, provided her fuel tank had not sprung a leak, which my mechanic
managed to seal swiftly every time with moist Wrigley gum harvested from inside
his cheeks.

As you will presently see, my friendship with Đức
and my love for this car were entwined. In truth, it wasn’t really my car. I
had leased it from Josyane, a comely French Hertz concessionaire who, as I
later found out, was also the agent of assorted Western European intelligence
agencies, including the BND, Germany’s equivalent of the CIA. I had often
wondered why Josyane rummaged furtively through the manuscripts on my desk when
she joined my friends and me for “sundowners” in Suite 214 of the Continental Palace.
I fantasized that she was attracted by my youthful and slender Teutonic looks
and my stiff dry martinis. She never let on that she read German; why would she
want to stare at my texts if they were incomprehensible to her? Well, now I
know: She was a spook, according to the Dutch station chief, possibly one of
her lovers. But that was alright! I loved her car and she loved my martinis,
which she handed around with amazing grace, and she was welcome to my stories
anytime; after all, they were written for the public at large.

But my mind is wandering. Let us return to Đức.
He was a droll twelve-year old with a mischievous grin reminding me of myself
when I was his age, a rascal in a large wartime city.True, I wasn’t homeless likeĐức, although the British Lancaster bombers and the American Flying
Fortresses pummeling Leipzig night and day during the final years of World War
II tried their best to render me that way.

Like Đức, I was an impish big-town
boy successfully bossing other kids on my block around. Đức
was different. He was an urchin with a high sense of responsibility. He
protectively watched over a gang of much younger orphans living on Tu Do
between Le Loi Boulevard and Le Than Ton Street, reporting to a middle-aged Mamasan headquartered on the sidewalk
outside La Pagode, a café famed for
its French pastries, and the renowned rendezvous point of pre-Communist
Saigon’s jeunesse dorée. Mamasan was the motherly press tycoon of
that part of the capital. She squatted there outside La Pagode surrounded by stacks of newspapers: papers in Vietnamese
and English, French and Chinese; the Vietnamese were avid readers. She handed
them out to Đức and his wards and several other bands of children assigned to
neighboring blocks.

From what I could observe, Đức was Mamasan’s most important lieutenant, the head paperboy at the busiest
end of his block.His turf was the
sidewalk between Givral, a restaurant
renowned for its Chinese noodle soup as well as the most authentic French onion
soup in all of Southeast Asia, and the entrance to the shopping passage in the
Eden Building, which housed the consular section of the West German embassy at
that time and the offices of the
Associated Press. I fancy that I was one of Đức’s favorite clients
because I bought the Saigon Daily News and
the Vietnam Guardian from him every
day, and the Saigon Post and the Journal d’Extrême Orient. Sometimes I
allowed him to cajole me into paying for a couple of Vietnamese-language
papers; not that I could read them, but I was intrigued by their frequent empty
spaces, the handiwork of government censors.

One late afternoon at the onset of the monsoon season, Đức
and I became business partners. The massive clouds in the tropical sky were
about to burst. Sheets of water threatened to descend on me with the force of a
guillotine blade transforming Saigon’s principal thoroughfare into a gushing
stream. I hastily squeezed my Traction
into a tight parking space outside Givral’s,
a muscle-building exercise given that this front wheel-driven machine lacked
power steering and was propelled by a heavy six-cylinder motor made of cast
iron. Exhausted, I switched off the engine by which time I was lusting for a
bottle of Bière Larue on the
Continental Palace’s open-air terrace when Đức stopped me.

The old Traction’s front
doors opened forward, thus in the opposite direction of the doors of all modern
cars. As I tried to dash out, Đức stood in my way pointing
at the windscreen sticker I had been issued that morning by my embassy. It bore
the German national colors, black, red and gold, and identified me as “Báo Chí
Đức,”
a German journalist. This was meant to protect me in case I ran into a Viet
Cong roadblock on my occasional weekend jaunts to Cap Saint-Jacques, now called
Vũng Tàu, a seaside resort once
known as the St. Tropez of the Orient. It actually did shield me in those days.
Whenever I ran into a patrol of black-clad Communist militiamen, they would
charge me a toll and let me go, but not before issuing me a stamped receipt.

“You Đức!” he shouted delightedly.
“My name Đức. We both Đức. We like brothers!” We
shook hands. Now I had a younger brother in Saigon; later I learned that his
remark meant even more: it was wordplay.Đức is also the Vietnamese word for virtuous.

“Okay, okay,” Đức continued. “You Đức,
you numbah One (the best). You and I do business, okay?”

Then he outlined our deal: I was to allow him and his wards to
seek shelter in my Traction. It would
become their bedroom, which they promised to keep immaculately clean. If I
wanted to leave any valuables in the car, they would be safe. Its lock no
longer worked; this much Đức had already ascertained.

“Okay, okay, Đức?” he pleaded impatiently.

I nodded. He whistled, and at once eight toddlers rushed out of
several doorways and piled into my Traction.
Three curled up on the back seats, two on the jump seats, one each in the
legroom separating them, one girl took the right front seat, another squatted
on the generous floor space under her feet, and Đức naturally took his place
behind the steering wheel.

“Bonne nuit, Đức,
you numbah one!” he said, slamming the door and winding up the window. At this
moment a torrent of rain poured down on the Traction
and on me. The kids were safe. I was drenched to the bones within seconds. I
ran into the Continental, needing more than a Larue.

First I had a shower in my room, then a whisky on the covered
terrace. As night fell I kept staring across Tu Do Street at my large Citroen with steamed up windows outside Givral’s. This sight pleased me. These
children were warm and dry. In all my years in Vietnam I rarely felt as happy
as on that evening, an uncommon sensation in a reporter’s life.

I am honoring Đức in this book to because
in my mind he personified many qualities that formed my affection and
admiration for the people of South Vietnam, and my compassion for them after
their abandonment by their protectors and their betrayal by some, though not
all, members of my profession. Like Đức, they are feisty and
resilient; they don’t whine, but pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and
they care for each other. When they are down, they rise again and accomplish
astonishing things.

I am in awe of the achievements of the hundreds of thousands of
South Vietnamese living and working close to my home in southern California. I
am full of admiration for those former boat people and survivors of Communist
reeducation camps, those former warriors suffering in silence from
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and other severe ailments caused by torture and
head injuries received in combat.

I hope that Đức’s adolescence and
adulthood turned out to be a success story as well, but I don’t know. We lost
contact 18 months after our first encounter. Was he drafted into the South
Vietnamese army and eventually killed in combat? Did he join the Vietcong and
perhaps die in their service? Was he among the thousands of civilians butchered
by the Vietcong during the Têt Offensive of 1968? Or did this crafty kid manage
to flee his homeland after the Communist victory of 1975? Perhaps he is alive
at the time of this writing is a successful 58-year old businessman or
professional in Westminster, California, just up the road from me; perhaps he
is reading this book.

I thought of Đức when two wonderful
Vietnamese friends, Quy Van Ly and his wife QuynhChau, better known as Jo,
invited me to address a convention of former military medical officers of the
South Vietnamese Army. They had been urging me for some time to write my
wartime reminiscences. “Do it for us,” they said, “do it for our children’s
generation. They want to know what it was like. You have special credibility
because as a German you had no dog in this fight.” Then, after listening to my
anecdotes such as the one about my encounter with Đức,
several of those retired physicians, dentists and pharmacists in my audience
said the same thing, and some bounced my speech around the Internet.

I do not presume to rewrite the history of the Vietnam War or even
give a comprehensive account of the nearly five years I spent in Indochina as a
correspondent first of the Axel Springer group of German newspapers and
subsequently as a visiting reporter of Stern,
an influentialHamburg-based
magazine. I beg my readers not to expect me to take sides in the domestic
squabbles between South Vietnamese factions, quarrels that are being
perpetuated in the huge communities of Vietnamese exiles today. When I mention
former Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky, for example, this does not mean that I
favor him over former President Nguyen van Thieu, or vice versa; I am just here
to tell stories, including some about Ky and some about Thieu, without wishing
to pass judgment on either. Theirs was an unenviable lot, and they deserve my
respect for having taken up an appalling burden.

As I stated in the first paragraph of this preface, I did not
welcome the victory of the Communists in 1975. They deserved this triumph as
little as the Taliban in Afghanistan will deserve the triumph, which I fear
will be theirs once NATO forces have left their country. It is also with this
latter sinister prospect in mind that I have written this book.

In Vietnam, I have been a witness to heinous atrocities the
Communists committed as a matter of policy, a witness to mass murder and
carnage beside which transgressions against the rules of war perpetrated on the
American and South Vietnamese side–- clearly not as a matter of policy or strategy – appear pale in
comparison. I know that many in the American and international mass media and
academe have unjustly, gratuitously and arrogantly maligned the South
Vietnamese and are still doing so. I was disgusted by the way returning GIs
were treated by their fellow countrymen and am shocked by the fact that the
continued suffering of South Vietnamese veterans is not deemed worthy of
consideration by U.S. journalists.

This book is a collection of personal sketches of what I saw,
observed, lived through and reported in my Vietnam years, and about the people
I met. It is a series of alternating narratives about experiences ranging from
the horrific to the absurd, from glamorous to frivolous pursuits, from despair
to hope. All the persons mentioned here are authentic, though in some cases I
changed their names to protect them or their next of kin.

To remind my readers and myself that this is ultimately a book
about a tragic war that ended in defeat for the victims of aggression, I will
insert a brief reflection underscoring this fact every few chapters, beginning
with a description of a mass murder the Communists committed during the 1968
Têt Offensive.

I owe gratitude to many people, but especially to my faithful
friends Quy and Jo who steadfastly stood behind me as I wrote this book giving
me every conceivable support while I labored over the manuscript. Every time I
had finished a chapter, Quy translated it immediately into elegant Vietnamese
with the help of his friend Nguyen Hien. He did the layout, designed the cover
and gave me sound advice on cultural and historical questions. I am proud to
have become part of Quy’s and Jo’s very traditional Vietnamese family in Orange
County. I thank Quy’s brother in law, Di Ton That, and his wife, Tran, who were
the first to contact me when I moved to southern California, and who introduced
me to the huge and thriving Vietnamese community in Orange County.

I am grateful to the
absent Đức, and to the countless other Vietnamese, American, French,
British and German friends I made in Vietnam. I also wish to thank the Vietnam
veterans whom I served as a chaplain intern at the VA Medical Center in St.
Cloud, Minnesota, and the psychologists and ministers with whom I worked in
order to provide those former soldiers with pastoral care. I am very thankful
to my friend Perry Kretz for allowing me to publish some of his magnificent
photographs from our reporting trip to Vietnam in 1972 in this volume.

I thank my friend and editor Peggy Strong and, most importantly,
my wife Gillian who in our 50 years of marriage has stood by me and endured our
long periods of separation caused by my assignment to an enchanting war-torn
country I have come to love.

Uwe
Siemon-Netto

LagunaWoods,
Calif., January 2014.

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Epilogue

The fruit of terror and the virtue of
hope

More than forty years have passed by
since I paid Vietnam my farewell visit.In 2015, the world will observe the 40th anniversary of the
Communist victory, and many will call it “liberation.” The Huế railway station,
where a locomotive and a baggage car left on a symbolic 500-yard journey every
morning at eight, no longer qualifies as Theater of the Absurd. It has been
attractively restored and painted pink. Once again, as in the days of French
dominance, it is the most beautiful station in Indochina, and taxi drivers do
not have to wait outside in vain. Ten comfortable trains come through every
day, five heading north, five going south. Collectively they are unofficially
called Reunification Express. Should I not rejoice? Is this not just as in
Germany, where the Berlin Wall and the minefields have gone, and now high speed
trains zoom back and forth between the formerly Communist East and the
democratic West at speeds up to 200 miles an hour?

Obviously
I am glad that the war is over and Vietnam is reunified and prosperous, that
the trains are running, and most of the minefields cleared. But this is where
the analogy with Germany ends. Germany achieved its unity, in part because the
Germans in the Communist East toppled their totalitarian government with
peaceful protest and resistance, and in part thanks to the wisdom of
international leaders such as Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush,
Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and partly because
of the predictable economic collapse of the flawed socialist system in the
Soviet Bloc. Nobody died in the process, nobody was tortured, nobody ended up
in camps, nobody was forced to flee.

There
is an incomprehensible tendency, even among respectable pundits in the West, to
refer to the Communist takeover of the South as “liberation,” thus following,
perhaps unwittingly, the contemptible line of Harvard Professor John Kenneth
Galbraith who arrogantly wished for South Vietnam to “go back to the
nothingness it so richly deserves.”

This
begs the question: liberation from what and to what? Was South Vietnam “freed”
for the imposition of a totalitarian one-party state that ranks among the
world’s worst offenders against the principles of religious liberty, freedom of
expression, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press?
What kind of liberation was this that cost 3.8 million Vietnamese lives between
1955 and 1975 and has forced more than one million Vietnamese to flee their
country, not only from the vanquished South, but even from ports in the North,
causing between 200,000 and 400,000 of the so-called boat people to drown?

Was
it an act of liberation to execute 100,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and
officials after the fall of Saigon? Was it meant to be a display of generosity
by the victors to herd between one million and 2.5 million South Vietnamese to
reeducation camps, where an estimated 165,000 perished and thousands more have
sustained lasting brain injuries and mental health problems resulting from
torture, according to a study by an international team of scholars led by
Harvard psychiatrist Richard F. Molina?

And
who were the liberators? Does nobody bother to consider the biography, history
and words of the man who launched this war of conquest? One of his names his
youthful admirers chanted on the campuses of virtually every Western
university: Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh. But that was not his real name. Today we know
that it was one of the 170 (!) pseudonyms he had given himself, being a top
agent of the Soviet-led Comintern, or
Communist International, since the 1920s. This was no secret by the time I
arrived in Vietnam in 1965.It
could be found in the textbooks that lay on most reporters’ bedside tables.

Those
who wanted to know had no difficulty finding out from reliable and impartial
sources what his real goal was. He said so himself: He wished none other than
to help bring about the global victory of Marxism-Leninism.

Had
independence of Vietnam from France been his primary objective he would not so
diligently have betrayed and liquidated all Indochinese freedom fighters no
following the Soviet party line, including nationalists, monarchists and
Trotskyists.

When
I lived in Saigon, it was perfectly known that Ho had been responsible for the
murder of at least 200,000 landowners in the Stalinist-style agrarian reform in
northern Vietnam between 1953 and 1956. Some sources even claim that 500,000
were killed. Countless others committed suicide to avoid being tortured to
death. Following the examples of Stalin and Mao Zedong, Ho’s primary reason for
these massacres was not so much the redistribution of wealth but the
“neutralization” of all potential “class enemies.”

As
we approach the 40th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, it is well
worth remembering that it was to a political movement with this blood-curdling
history that the Congress of the United States delivered South Vietnam when it
voted to stop almost all further military aid to this bleeding country, thus
accepting the view of Prof. Galbraith and likeminded intellectuals that “the
assumed enemy does not exist.”Since
the mid-1960s, political and historical mythographers in the West have either
naively or dishonestly accepted Hanoi’s line that this conflict was a “People’s
War.” Well it was, if one accepts Mao Zedong’s and Vo Nguyen Giap’s
interpretation of the term. But the Saxon Genitive implies that a “People’s
War” is supposed to be a war of the
people. In truth, it wasn’t. Some 3.8 million Vietnamese were killed between
1955 and 1975. Approximately 164,000 South Vietnamese civilians were
annihilated in a Communist democide during
that same period, according to political scientist Rudolf Joseph Rummel of the
University of Hawaii. The Pentagon estimated that 950,000 North Vietnamese and
more than 200,000 South Vietnamese soldiers fell in combat, in addition to
58,000 U.S. troops. This was no war of
the people; it was a war against the
people.

In
the all too often hypocritical rhetoric about the Vietnam War over the last 40
years, the key question has gone AWOL, to use a military acronym meaning absent
without leave, and the question is: Did the Vietnamese people desire a
Communist regime? If so, how was it that nearly one million northerners moved
south following the division of their country in 1954, while only about 130,000
Vietminh sympathizers went in the opposite direction?

Who
started this war? Were there any South Vietnamese units operating in North
Vietnam? No. Did South Vietnamese guerillas cross the 17th parallel to
disembowel and hang pro-Communist village chiefs, their wives and children in
the northern countryside? No. Did the South Vietnamese regime massacre an
entire class of people by the tens of thousands in its territory after 1954 the
way the North Vietnamese had liquidated landowners and other potential
opponents of their Soviet-style rule? No. Did the South Vietnamese establish a
monolithic one-party system? No.

As
a German citizen, I had no dog in this fight, as Americans would say. But to
paraphrase the Journalists’ Prayer Book, if hardened reporters have a heart at
all, mine was, and still is, with the wounded Vietnamese people. It belongs to
these sublime women who can often be so blunt and amusing; it belongs to the
cerebral and immensely complicated Vietnamese men trying to dream the perfect
dream in a Confucian way; to the childlike soldiers going to battle carrying
their only possessions – a canary in a cage; to young war widows who had their
bodies grotesquely modified just to catch a GI husband and create a new home
for their children and perhaps for themselves, rather than face a Communist
tyranny; to those urban and rural urchins minding each other and water
buffalos. What a hardened heart I had, it belonged to those I saw running away
from the butchery and the fighting – always in a southerly direction, but never
ever north, until at the very end there was no VC-free square inch to escape
to.I saw them slaughtered
or buried alive in mass graves, and still have the stench of putrefying corpses
in my nostrils.I
wasn’t there when Saigon fell after entire ARVN units, often so maligned in the
U.S. media and now abandoned by their American allies, fought on nobly, knowing
that they would neither win nor survive this final battle. I was in Paris,
mourning, when all this happened, and I wish I could have paid my respects to
five South Vietnamese generals before they committed suicide when the game was
over that they should have won: Le Van Hung (born 1933), Le Nguyen Vy (born
1933), Nguyen Khoa Nam (born 1927), Tran Van Hui (born 1927) and Pham Van Phu (born 1927). As
I write this epilogue, a fellow journalist and scholar of sorts, a man born in
1975 when Saigon fell, is making a name for himself, pillorying American war
crimes in Vietnam. Yes, they deserve to be pilloried. Yes, they were a reality.
My Lai was reality; I know, I was at the court martial where Lt. William Calley
was found guilty. I know that the body count fetish dreamed up by the warped
minds of political and military leaders of the McNamara era in Washington and
U.S. headquarters in Saigon cost thousands of innocent civilians their lives.But
no atrocity committed by dysfunctional American or South Vietnamese units ever
measured up to the state-ordered carnage inflicted upon the South Vietnamese in
the name of Ho Chi Minh. These crimes his successors will not even acknowledge
to this very day because nobody has the guts to ask them: why did your people
slaughter all these innocents whom you claimed to have fought to liberate? As a
German, I take the liberty of adding a footnote here: why did you murder my
friend Hasso Rüdt von Collenberg and the German doctors in Huế? Why did you
kidnap those young Knights of Malta volunteers, subjecting some to death in the
jungle and others to imprisonment in Hanoi? Why does it not even occur to you
to search your conscience regarding these actions, the way thoughtful
Americans, while correctly laying claim to have been on the right side in World
War II, wrestle with the terrible legacy left by the carpet bombing of
residential areas in Germany and the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Reminiscing
on her ordeal on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the news magazine Der Spiegel, the West German nurse
Monika Schwinnrecalled her encounter
with North Vietnamese combat units on their way south as one of her most
horrifying experiences. She described the intensity of hatred in the facial
expressions of these soldiers and wrote that her Vietcong minders had great
difficulty preventing them from killing the Germans on the spot. Nobody is born
hating. Hate must be taught. Fostering murder in the hearts of young people
involved a teaching discipline at which only the school of totalitarianism
excels. In his brilliant biography of SS leader Heinrich Himmler, historian
Peter Longrich relates that even this founder of this evil force of
black-uniformed thugs did not find it easy to make his men overcome natural
inhibitions to execute the holocaust (Longerich. Heinrich Himmler. Oxford: 2012). It was the hatred in the eyes of
the North Vietnamese killers in Huế that many of the survivors I interviewed
considered most haunting. But of course one did have to spend time with them,
suffer with them, gain their confidence and speak with them to discover this
central element of a human, political and military catastrophe that is still
with us four decades later. Opining about it from the ivory towers of a New
York television studio or an Ivy League school does not suffice.

In
a stirring book about the French Foreign Legion, Paul Bonnecarrère relates the
historic meeting between the legendary Col. Pierre Charton and Gen. Vo Nguyen
Giap after France’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu (Bonnecarrère. Par le Sang Versé. Paris: 1968).Charton was a prisoner of war in the hands of the Communist Vietminh. Giap came to pay his respects
to him but also to gloat. The encounter took place in a classroom in front some
20 students attending a political indoctrination session. The dialogue between
the two antagonists went thus:

Giap:
“I have defeated you, mon colonel!

Charton:
“No you haven’t, mon général. The
jungle has defeated us… and the support you have exacted from the civilian
population - by means of terror.”

Vo
Nguyen Giap didn’t like this answer, and forbade his students to write it down.
But it was the truth, or more precisely: it was half of the truth. The other
half was that democracies like the United States seemed indeed politically and
psychologically ill equipped to fight a protracted war. This realization,
alongside the use of terror tactics, became a pillar of Giap’s strategy. He was
right and he won. Even more dangerous totalitarians are taking note today.

To
this very day I am haunted by the conclusion I was forced to draw from my
Vietnam experience: when a self-indulgent throwaway culture grows tired of
sacrifice it becomes capable of discarding everything like a half-eaten donut.
It is prepared to dump a people whom it set out to protect. It is even willing
to trash the lives, the physical and mental health, the dignity, memory and
good name of the young men who were sent to war. This happened in the case of
the Vietnam Veterans. The implications of this deficiency endemic in liberal
democracies are terrifying because in the end it will demolish their legitimacy
and destroy a free society.

However,
I must not end my narrative on this dark note. As an observer of history, I
know that history, while closed to the past, is always open to the future. As a
Christian I know who is the Lord of history. The Communist victory in Vietnam
was based on evil foundations: terror, murder and betrayal. Obviously, I do not
advocate a resumption of bloodshed to rectify this outcome, even if this were
possible. But as an admirer of the resilient Vietnamese people, I know that
they will ultimately find the right peaceful means and the leaders to rid
themselves of their despots. It might take generations, but it will happen.

In
this sense, I will now join the queue of the pedicab drivers outside the Huế
railway station where no passenger arrived back in 1972. Where else would my
place be? What else do I possess but hope?

Followers

About Me

Dr. Uwe Siemon-Netto, born in 1936, is the executive director of the Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life based Capistrano Beach, Cal He is also a regular contributor to English and German-language publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto, a native of Leipzig, has been an international journalist for 53 years. In mid-career, he turned to theology, earning his M.A. from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, and his Ph.D. degree in theology and sociology of religion from Boston University. His published works include The Acquittal of God, A Theology for Vietnam Veterans; The Fabricated Luther, a refutation of the stereotype that Luther was Hitler’s progenitor; and One Incarnate Truth, The Christian Answer to Postmodern Confusion.